


How Little All Appears, and He How Great

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [2]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gay Soho, HIV/AIDS, Islam, LGBTQ history, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Original Character Death(s), Period Typical Attitudes, Prayer, References to Illness, Sort Of, UK AIDS crisis, magical inadequacies, medical research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-06 03:48:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12203283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: In 2012, the future seems bright. In 1988 it wasn't, necessarily. Abdul mourns for the dead, and celebrates the living.Also known as the time when Nightingale proposed in a graveyard (sort of) and Peter lost his shit.





	How Little All Appears, and He How Great

**Author's Note:**

> This piece is darker than usual (with a happy ending!) and not very related to magic or canon, but I realized that, given the timeline I had set up for Walid & Nightingale in this series, there is no way that a doctor and a newly-not-celibate Edwardian gay man living in London in the 1980s/early 1990s would have been able to avoid the UK AIDS crisis. Rating & tags for frequent mention of death and disease, period-specific attitudes towards HIV/AIDS, and for the death of one OC character in particular.

*

**December 14, 2012**

Once he had settled properly into Albert St in the nineties, Abdul Walid switched allegiances from the Fitzrovia Mosque on Goodge Street to the London Central. It felt like a good clean break to make in keeping with his new phase of life, and the fact that he got to walk through Regent’s Park to get to it from home or from UCH alike gave him the perfect opportunity to relax himself into a state of _niyyah_ , emptying his mind of the work of any particular day and preparing himself to offer the appropriate worship of Allah’s glory.

He liked that it was moderate; he liked that the whole diverse melee that was London was represented there, and that it was one of the few places, even in mixed, mixed-up Britain, where he didn’t get much of a glance for being a white Scotsman entering a mosque. And he liked that it was busy enough and passively tolerant enough that he could, if he chose, interpret what prayer meant to him in his own particular way – believing as he did that Allah was indeed the Most Merciful, and would excuse him both his faults and his experiments.

For many years now, he had spent the month of December offering up what he suspected would have been some fairly unusual thoughts to the Almighty. He had searched long and hard for words that would be appropriate; it had taken him several years and several very dodgy English translations to get to the true beauty that was the hadiths of the medieval Persian scholars of Islam, and to Ibn Majah. But he did get there in the end, and the words the long-dead sage provided for the funeral prayer were perfect for what Abdul had in mind, and so it was that every December, sometimes each day, sometimes just when he could get away and find the time – like today – he made his way to the Central, found himself a space in among the Friday crowds, and offered up his long list of supplications.

_Oh Allah, surely Harry Ogden is under Your protection, and in the rope of Your security, so save him from the trial of the grave and from the punishment of the Fire. You fulfill promises and grant rights, so forgive him and have mercy on him. Surely You are Most Forgiving, Most Merciful._

Abdul straightened, took a deep breath, and prostrated again.

_Allahumma 'inna Barry Whiting fee thimmakka._

_Allahumma 'inna William Clark fee thimmakka..._

***

 **December 14, 1988**  

Abdul had first heard of it when it didn’t have a name, in 1982. It didn’t need a name for him to be horrified by the vagueness and moral judgement of the CDC reports which tended to get idly passed around the hospital staff during quiet hours when they needed something, anything, to keep their minds off the boredom of waiting for patients or test results. The international edition of _The New York Times_ ’s designation of it as a ‘homosexual precancer syndrome’ was bad enough; in later years, when he was surrounded by toe-rag tabloids that screamed about ‘gay plagues,’ Abdul would long for that relative restraint. He read in _Time Out_ at the end of 1981 that a man in Brompton had died of Kaposi’s sarcoma, and tried not to let himself dwell on it – but it made its way to the capital all the same.

“There’s a bloke at St. Thomas’s who they reckon’s got that,” one of his colleagues had said over Abdul’s shoulder as he was leafing his way through a new paper on an outbreak in California one bleary morning in the summer of 1982, when they were all just a month away from finishing their stints as juniors and were subsisting on coffee and the occasional fry-up whenever they could manage it. “Horrible. Brain eaten up, lungs coughed out. Got to feel sorry for them, I suppose,” he finished, on a yawn, and went off to his shift leaving Abdul feeling not a little the worse for wear himself.

It only took a few months in that same year for the name of the disease to become official, and for Abdul to start hearing a lot more about AIDS – at least, inside the hospital. The world outside took a while longer to become alarmed, and Soho, with its bars, its nightlife, and its abandon to a world which didn’t care what anyone else thought of it, took longer still.

No one wanted to think they could die from love, after all. The irony, and the condescension of the world, was too painful for anyone to accept that.

It was 1985 when he started seeing patients of his own, brought in as a specialist when the first symptom to occur – or the first that would actually get the men, and the occasional woman, into UCH – was vomiting or diarrhea. By then, he could at least recommend that blood should be drawn to test for the causative LAV and HTLV-III viruses, and learned, or rather re-learned, a new skill: he had been taught, perfunctorily, in medical school how to deliver the news that someone was dying, but most of the things he had dealt with in the past concerned known unknowns. He could tell someone dying of stomach or bowel cancer that they were dying because it was cancer, and tell them they could fight, and offer up hope; with the viruses that would be consolidated and renamed HIV in 1986, he could do none of that. The unknowns remained stubbornly unknown, and the papers called the rakes of men whom he visited in the new sterile, lonely quarantine ward of UCH filthy sex fiends and addicts, and there was nothing he could do about it.

It occurred to him many times, during those visits, that he should check the victims for _vestigia_ , but he’d dismissed it as a passing fancy, a misguided attempt to pass the biological cruelty of the world off onto the world of humanity, as if the idea of a magician causing gay men to sicken and die could have been solved by an investigation and an arrest.

When he could he tried, as he always tried to try, to help – he found himself on the little team of people who volunteered to puzzle out wiring and circuits when the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard couldn’t find an electrician who wasn’t petrified of getting AIDS from merely breathing in the same air as their staff; he tried to answer questions on the rare occasions when he went for a drink at the Royal Vauxhall and someone inevitably found out that he was a doctor. It didn’t feel like enough. All he ever felt from his patients was their fear, all mixed up with no little amount of his own – though he tried his best to suppress it, tried his best to acknowledge and move through the pang of grief he couldn’t help but feel when the deaths started to touch the circles of people he knew in his little corner of London.

He had met Harry Ogden in 1983. He was, in many ways, a cipher for Abdul himself; from a small town in Wales, a student at Edinburgh (in cardiology) in the years just after Abdul had graduated, drawn to London and drawn to the madcap tomfoolery that was the community of young medical professionals hacking it in the inner boroughs. He had moved into a spare room in the warren of interconnected flats Abdul lived in above a bookshop on Great Marlborough Street, and Abdul knew him as a pleasant, congenial sort of acquaintance, a man you wouldn’t hesitate to include in a group going down the pub or trust to keep an eye on your door while you were away from home.

The next Abdul really knew of Harry, he was lying in a room at UCH in December of 1988 with his arms and face riddled with the blotches of Kaposi’s, and there was a team of irritated-looking nurses hovering around him covered to their eyeballs in gloves and masks.

“Shit,” he breathed from the double-door of the ward, half-swung closed – he had been on his way past to get to a classroom, but that was gone completely from his mind. “Harry?”

“Abdul,” Harry said, his grin grotesque; his breath came short and fast, the pneumonia having already taken hold, and Abdul’s mind, despite himself, rapidly revised life expectation down from days to hours. “Fine mess I’ve gotten myself into.”

Abdul pulled the door shut behind him, dumped the armful of papers he’d been carrying onto an empty bed, and crossed immediately over to Harry – and when he reached out to take Harry’s hand, one of the nurses gasped.

Abdul looked at her; she was middle-aged and looked stern above her facemask, her eyes peering at the sight of Abdul’s bare hand grasping Harry’s wrist. Behind her, the other staff hovered, shifting their feet.

"Get out," Abdul said.

He knew he sounded and probably looked vicious; he couldn't recall being so angry in all his life. The nurse looked at him, startled and wide-eyed, and then her gaze narrowed sharply.

"You're not even supposed to bloody be in here," she said. "I can report you."

"Report me, then," Abdul gritted out, "on your way out the fucking door."

She held up her hands, sarcastically abandoning her work; Abdul waited until the lot of them were outside, and the door had slammed behind them, before he looked back at Harry.

“Idiotic bastards,” he muttered, smoothing the pillows behind Harry’s head and looking quickly over the blinking screen of poor, and falling, stats. “If Princess Di can go around touching AIDS patients you’d think it’d be good enough for them.”

“Didn’t she look beautiful doing it, too,” Harry grinned, his gaze focused on something far away.

“How long have you known?”

“Tested positive a year ago,” Harry said, and coughed, a dry, wracking sound. “Been this bad a week or so. Took me a few days to manage to call someone and find a cab to get here.”

Abdul sighed, hating himself, and put a hand back over Harry’s. “I’ve got to ask – ”

“How many others?” Harry interrupted, a smile on his face that managed to be sweet and forgiving behind the desperation. “Always the scientist, you are.”

“I’m so sorry,” Abdul breathed.

“Don’t be, mate,” Harry rasped, shaking his head. “Just the one. His name’s Barry. He went into hospital last week, and I wasn’t able to get ahold of him.”

“Which hospital?”

“Bart’s,” Harry whispered, and then he ran out of breath, and could only give Abdul a pleading look.

“I’ll go and call now. Don’t go anywhere,” Abdul smiled, and it broke his heart to see it returned.

There was no record of a Barry with AIDS symptoms on the wards at St. Bart’s; nor was there one at St. Thomas’s, the Royal, London Bridge, Guy’s, or King’s College. He came up empty everywhere he tried – until it occurred to him to call Bart’s again, and ask for the morgue instead of the wards.

Then, he got his answer.

When he came back to Harry’s room, Harry was asleep – or unconscious, it was hard to tell which with his overall health so poor – and Abdul didn’t have the courage to try and wake him.

He slipped away so quietly, around six o’clock, that it took Abdul a long few minutes to realize the machines had gone silent.

The Folly had been a place of refuge for Abdul ever since he’d found it, though he might not have thought of it that way early on. In retrospect, every night after every extremely long day that he got to spend devouring Molly’s cooking was a relief, as opposed to making what measly meals he could over a hob in his flat; every long conversation with Thomas and every occasional magical discovery was a stimulation that could take him away from the hours and the drudgery and the slow pace of change in a socialized medical system, as much as he knew that he was doing the work for which he had always been intended.

That night, he walked to the Folly knowing, more consciously than ever before, that he needed it.

Thomas was down in the practice range when he arrived, and Molly was going out to the coach house with a huge armful of rugs that apparently needed to be beaten free of dust despite having never been stepped on in a decade or two. Abdul mustered up a smile for her as she staggered past and went into the kitchen to cobble together some form of supper, but ended up just sitting at the long kitchen table with his tea rapidly growing cold between his hands, wondering when it was that he had forgotten that every death was personal to someone, somewhere.

He found his eyes wandering for the second or third time, longingly, over to the cabinet where he knew Molly kept the supplies for Nightingale's various tipples, and was abruptly, incandescently angry with himself. He got up from the table, poured the remainder of his tea into the sink, and then firmly put the mug down – so firmly, in fact, that it rang sharply against the burnished copper under the tap and broke into pieces with a quick snap, and one of its shards left a two-inch, slicing gash across his palm.

There was a quiet sound from the corridor, and Thomas appeared in the doorway, clearly drawn by the noise of Abdul swearing.

"Are you all right?" he asked, frowning, and then he was coming over to the sink and reaching out for Abdul's hand. "Let me see it."

The terror at the sight of any part of Thomas coming near his blood spread through Abdul so quickly that he didn't have time to be ashamed.

"Don't touch it," he snapped, and pulled rapidly away; Thomas immediately stilled, and seemed wary for a moment before he looked, really looked, at Abdul's exhaustion, and then his face softened.

"All right, I won't," he said carefully. "You clean that up, and then we'll sit down and talk."

Before he could think what to do, Molly swooped in on Abdul, emerging from the shadow of the doorway behind Nightingale and instantly taking his palm between his. When he wordlessly tried to protest she simply hissed at him, furious and sharp-toothed, and shoved him down to sit in the nearest kitchen chair. Three minutes later she was laying aside a bloodstained dishcloth and carefully applying the last of a large layer of sticking plasters, and she didn't back away once she had finished. Instead she hovered over him, narrow-eyed and staring, and Abdul could only look helplessly over the table at Thomas, wondering how to start.

"Is there – " He cleared his throat and tried again. "Are there spells which can heal?"

Thomas gave the question due consideration before answering. "There were always rumors of various worldwide traditions that focused more closely on what we might now call folk healing," he said slowly. "But so far as Newtonian magic is concerned – I'm afraid not. Even if the magical capacity exists, the spells have not been written for it."

Abdul looked down at the table, more tired than he had felt in a very long time. "Have you heard of AIDS?"

Thomas hadn't, because he didn’t read the sort of newspapers which gave a damn one way or the other – and so Abdul had to tell the whole story from the beginning. About the articles full of confusion and obfuscation and lies that had circulated in the States; about the strange sarcomas which the crueler of the world started calling gay cancer; about the first man, so far as anyone could tell, who died of it in the UK in Brompton, and then London’s first victim in 1982. About the utter failure of politicians and the reedy, panicked warnings of underfunded and underappreciated scientists; about the marches, about the petitions, about the uproar when Diana and the Queen Mother had opened that new ward in Middlesex and been taken briskly about like posh Mother Teresas, laying on bare hands.

About Soho laid waste, and partners lost, and friends dead, and the Switchboard overwhelmed, and Harry Ogden, whom his parents would never understand, being sent home to them in a cardboard box.

Thomas occasionally asked questions, a familiar, but unusually calm mix of lost nerve and determination creeping into his face. When Abdul talked about Harry, he reached halfway across the table as though on instinct, and then stopped himself; when Abdul talked about the methods of transmission, he almost smiled, though there was no mirth in it.

"Sex and needles," he said quietly. "It would have ravaged my circle in my day, too. We used to take Heroin for a cough."

He looked quickly, then, down at Abdul's bandaged hand. "But surely _you're_ not – "

Thomas was halfway out of his chair, suddenly, leaning forward; Abdul tried to parse whether he was preparing to flee – for which Abdul couldn't honestly have blamed him – or wanting to comfort him. His head said the former; his heart hoped the latter.

"I'll get tested to be sure. But I believe the science – I'm not aware of any blood-to-blood contact between us. It cannot be transmitted through skin-to-skin."

He left off the added implication that he and Harry had never been lovers, because to say it out loud seemed disrespectful of the dead. Thomas relaxed a little, but still wouldn't take his clear, worried gaze off of Abdul. "You seem frightened, nonetheless."

"Of course I am," Abdul said, on the back of a laugh, wondering why on earth anyone wouldn't be.

Belatedly, it occurred to him that, despite his growing feelings, he had probably never really made clear in any conversation with Thomas which way he swung. The realization stunned him into silence, and he found he had nothing more to say.

Molly chose that moment to shield him from Thomas's eyes, filling his vision as she wrapped him up in clingy arms and gave him a slightly painful, but certainly sincere, attempt at a hug. She smelled like baking powder and lemon, and felt like respite.

It took him a while to wander back to his flat that night, trying (and mostly failing) as he was not to despair too much at losing a friend, possibly losing his job, probably having warned Thomas off of sex for all time, and almost certainly torpedoing any chance he could ever have had at being loved by the Master of the Folly – all in one day.

***

**2012**

Abdul was loth to admit that there could ever have been an upside to the entire dark time that was that December – but in personal terms it turned out there was, because it emerged, once he and Thomas had decided to forget the world and he was living in the Folly, that Thomas was more than happy to practice the safest sex Abdul had ever had. He was willing to pay tribute in evening drinks to the small crowd of middle-aged men Abdul sometimes met and talked with at the Admiral Duncan; he shared, with no prompting, stories about growing up reading the forbidden texts of Wilde as though they were still important to his life in the here and now. On one occasion, he admitted to keeping a dog-eared copy of _Maurice_ somewhere in the Folly, and Abdul was touched enough by that that he kept an eye for months at a time on Soho cinema listings until he could suggest that Thomas go see James Wilby and Hugh Grant act it out in the flesh (so to speak). He never knew whether Thomas had actually gone, but it was the thought, he believed, which counted.

And Thomas had joined him in what turned out to be the most lasting tradition of them all – when, every December, Abdul offered up his prayers, and then offered his tokens of remembrance to the dead.

He came out of the Central around three in the afternoon to his phone buzzing from a text, and wasn’t surprised to see the Jag double-parked on Park Road, its police light slowly spinning on its roof as other disgruntled drivers maneuvered gingerly around it. When Abdul got into the passenger seat he was surprised, but certainly not displeased, to see Peter in the back of the car, looking a bit ragged around the edges; the jazz vampires case was certainly working him hard enough that Abdul could only appreciate the gesture that was the both of them taking the time to be with him.

It was only a twenty-minute drive to Highgate Cemetery, despite the Friday traffic, but it was already starting to grow into evening; the walk through the trees and gravestones and little gravel paths got Abdul warm enough that he slung his coat and scarf over his arm, and let Thomas take the lead with the carnations. They had been Thomas’s idea, in fact, many years ago – Abdul had known it was a Victorian symbol of recognition, but it never would have occurred to him that Thomas himself would have been open to displaying and sharing such a sign.

He had learned a lot about assumptions, he thought, gently happy, as he watched Thomas pull another little green flower out of his coat pocket and place it beneath the headstone of William Clark.

They ended at the grave of Barry Whiting, whom Abdul had tried not to forget despite having never met the man, which was near the entrance to the cemetery itself. Peter had trailed respectfully behind them the entire time, not quite understanding at first, but also not asking any questions; after the second flower had been placed, Abdul had looked back to see dawning, slightly stricken comprehension in his face, and had given him a smile to reassure him that this ritual was not designed to open up new wounds. Nevertheless, Abdul couldn’t deny that the whole endeavour was exhausting, as it always was, and chose to stand in silence as he looked back through the trees with Thomas’s hand in his.

"I hear a controversial bill has been introduced into Parliament this week," Thomas said, breaking the silence, squeezing Abdul's hand without looking away from the gravestones.

"It has indeed," Abdul said, his grief instantly starting to curdle away. He looked at Thomas, at the worn, thoughtful lines in his face, and smiled. "I understand it's likely to pass. Are you interested in its outcome?"

"Very."

"Good," Abdul said; there was warmth spreading through him now like the distant memory of Scottish whiskey. "I suppose we'll find out what the procedures shall be."

Thomas nodded, and, with a brief nod at Peter and another strong grasp of Abdul's fingers, he let go and started walking back towards the Jag, leaving Abdul to put his jacket and scarf back on while Peter looked back and forth between the two of them.

"What bill?" Peter asked, and then immediately answered his own question. "The gay marriage bill?"

"I believe that's what he was referring to, yes."

"You're _fucking_ kidding me," Peter said quietly, and then he started getting a lot louder, his face twitching suspiciously into a fierce, toothy smile. "Are you _–_ did he just _propose?_ "

"In his way, I suppose he did," Abdul grinned.

"You utter wankers!" Peter yelped, and spun in a disbelieving half-circle, glaring at the distant figure that was Thomas in the carpark. "You are both complete bastards – wait, did you say yes!?"

"Yes. Come now, Peter, you're supposed to be a detective," Abdul laughed.

" _Fuck_ you," Peter whooped, and, after giving Abdul a brief but bone-crushing hug, practically raced back to the Jag to give Thomas what-for, too. 

Abdul breathed out the past, and found himself very glad – indescribably so, now – as he walked out of the cemetery, to still be living in the future.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title from an anonymous poem about Isaac Newton published in the _London Medley_ , 1731. Huge thanks to [jackmarlowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe) for an incredibly helpful talk about the history involved (all remaining mistakes are totally my own), and to [AgarthanGuide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/pseuds/AgarthanGuide) for her readthrough. Plus, a shoutout to the [Terrence Higgins Trust](http://www.tht.org.uk/); it was established in memory of the first man to die in London whom I mentioned. Thanks for reading!


End file.
